Blog

By: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS On May 15th, the NHS (UK’s National Health Service) suffered its single worst disruption to service in the history of the organisation. The disruption was due to a type of malicious software, known as ransomware, with the purpose of attempting to extort money from victims by encrypting their […]

By: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS It’s no secret that DDoS attacks are on the rise. Statistic-after-statistic, report-after-report, all say the same thing about DDoS. However, who are the companies that have perfected the technology, tactics, techniques, and procedures used in front-lines to defeat DDoS attacks every day? NSFOCUS is one such company that […]

By: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS Over the past year, the cyber security industry has changed significantly in the light of an innovative tool called “Threat Intelligence” (TI). Organizations of all sizes are beginning to gain understanding of the value of TI; however, there is some confusion concerning what organizations believe they are receiving […]

By: Dr. Richard Zhao, SVP of Global Threat Research, NSFOCUS Overview During the week of January 21, 2017, over 34,000 vulnerable MongoDB databases fell victim to a ransom attack. Data residing on these databases was erased or encrypted and bitcoin payment was demanded in lieu for return of the data. Moreover, on January 18th, 2017, […]

By: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS Cyber extortion and attacks can take many forms – from ransomware to DDoS shakedowns and data-dump blackmail, organizations all over the globe have been directly impacted by these campaigns in 2016. This year we saw the first DDoS attack exceeding 1Tbps in size and the proliferation of attacks […]

By: Dr. Richard Zhao, SVP of Global Threat Research, NSFOCUS In September 2016, prominent world leaders representing the top 20 global economies gathered together in Hangzhou, China to kick off the 11th meeting of Group of Twenty (G20). This year marked the first time that the event was hosted in China and as a result, […]

Author: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS Over the last year, the cybersecurity industry has been abuzz about this new thing called “threat intelligence”. However, threat intelligence (intel) as a whole is not really that new. Threat intel was probably used in every military-like campaign going back to the rise of the great civilizations […]

Author: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS One of the things that amazes me the most is how the general population lacks a firm understanding of the cyber threats they face daily. Since few people outside of security circles have actually been trained in cyber security, the general lack of knowledge pertaining to cyber-attacks […]